Thursday, August 19, 2010

A few iotas of Myst news

I haven't posted one of these since the Gameshelf got its stylish new (that is, Greek antiquarian) logo. But the fanboy I remain, so here's what Cyan has been whispering:

The Manhole for iPhone/iPad/etc is out. (App Store link) It's a whimsical children's story-or-environment -- worth exploring if you only know the Myst series.

Riven for iPhone/iPad/etc is marked as "coming soon". Riven is my favorite of the series, but I haven't played it since its original release -- it's notably hard to get running on modern machines. (Even harder than Myst, which has been updated and re-implemented all over the place.) I am seriously looking forward to this one.

Cyan also pushed a stack of games up on Steam. But if you use Steam, you probably saw that.

And finally, this teaser page was linked from Cyan's home page today (although I don't see it there now). The banner tag was "Never Let Your Timbers Be Shivered." What is it? Looks like some kind of resource-based explore-and-fight. With pirates. That's all we know -- except that a Cyan folk also dropped into a forum thread and linked to this MP3 file.

Comments imported from Gameshelf

Adam Sampson (Sep 11, 2010 at 8:36 AM):

So I recently bought an original copy of Riven on eBay after running across your review of it, and remembering a housemate enthusing about it. It turned out to be very straightforward to get it working under Wine in Linux, the only caveat being that you have to skip the scan for existing QuickTime versions during installation. It seems like it'd be worth a try running the Windows version of Riven under Wine on MacOS X...
Andrew Plotkin (Sep 11, 2010 at 12:44 PM):

There's a Mac project called RivenX ( http://www.devklog.net/rivenx/ ) which is trying to write a modern OSX engine for the Riven data files. They say it's playable and nearly perfect. I haven't tested it, though.